The Men’s Rights infographic no feminist can rebut! (Because it’s impossible to read.)

Designed — if that’s the word for it — by an MRA and #GamerGater who calls himself BJSparky, this lovely “poster” offers up a 2000-word wall of text in such tiny type it’s impossible to read.

Well, not completely impossible. I snagged the largest version of the poster I was able to successfully download on BJ’s Deviant Art page and enlarged it until the text was a more reasonable size for reading — albeit a bit blurry. (There may be a larger version, but I got a broken image when I clicked on his download button.)

A quick scan reveals that this particular wall of text seems to have been built mostly with straw: it’s a list of allegedly feminist beliefs that no feminists actually believe. (Admittedly, I didn’t read every example; for all I know, the entire right side of the poster might be made up of passages copied from Supernatural fanfic or James Joyce’s Ulysses.)

Here are some of BJ’s straw feminist nuggets:

As you can see, BJ is as elegant a writer as he is a designer.

I would kind of love to see these straw feminist nuggets blown up and used as signs at some straw feminist demonstration.

Looking again at that poster, it uses a common passive-aggressive tactic of right-wing bumper stickers: have something unobjectionable in huge print (“Feminists fight for women’s rights and freedoms”), and then the obnoxious part in really teeny weeny print. For example:

“OBAMA” (in huge letters)
Somewhere a village in Kenya is missing its idiot” ( in small letters)

The flaw with that, graphically, is that most drivers don’t take the time to read the fine print. All they see is OBAMA. So it looks like the sticker is supporting Obama, full stop.

Similarly, the average person who sees that floating around on the internet will see the big headline, think “well, that’s true, feminists do want equal rights…wow, that’s a lot of tiny print. Will.not.read.” and go about their day. It doesn’t matter if there’s a bunch of hidden tee-hee Easter Egg gotchas buried in there if nobody’s going to bother reading them. Whoever designed it can smirk and pat themselves on the back at their cleverness all they want, but from a messaging standpoint it’s a total failure.

The piece is titled “Feminist memes reveal their hatred and bigotry” but they only take on ONE image, (see below) so I don’t know why the plural, and the text on the Feminist Meme doesn’t actually show any bigotry. No hatred is ‘revealed’ until the OP starts doing mental gymnastics in their text and talking about stuff that has nothing to do with feminism, let alone the image.

We’re used to seeing the “Men are pigs! What do we do with pigs? WE CASTRATE THEM!” style memes.

Where? I’ve never seen any call for ubiquitous male castration, not even in a ‘funny’ meme.
And yet supposedly it’s what I’m all about, right?

The war on tampons? The what?

Oh please, not the draft again.

[feminists] were part of the system that forced men to die in war and then the feminists continue to blame them for being men forced into fighting wars. It’s sickening.

I’m sorry, how? Given the utter lack of representation in government how would feminists be responsible for this one? Especially when everything shows that feminists are generally against war, no matter who is fighting.

Chie Satonaka: that proposal was made jokingly, by a MALE party member, who was tired of the mess in the men’s restroom.

I definitely believe that, considering the original article is scrubbed and all that’s left is conservative gnashing of teeth. It’s like all those times that an Onion article got treated seriously by the media.

No one truly understands feminism, because feminism is a word hidden behind by lots of people with lots of different agendas.

You’re so right. I mean, there’s the real-life feminists that are generally geared towards women’s rights, but have a wide variety of means for achieving that goal and thoughts for how and why the system works the way it does, and then you have the straw feminists in yorur head that want to kill all men and treat them as chattel in the upcoming feminist-overmind-run dystopian society.

How could anyone make sense out of feminism when so many conflicting ideas are attached to the word?

Let’s examine it. “Feminism has fought no wars. It has killed no opponents. It has set up no concentration camps, starved no enemies, practiced no cruelties.” This is just plain wrong and a bit absurd, but let’s take this at face value. Neither has Buddhism, or scientology, or supply side economics for that matter. Would it make sense to bully dissenters to these ideologies by screeching “Why, what’s your problem?” What’s more, neither has the Men’s Rights Movement that feminist bigots so bitterly oppose.

“Scientology” has practiced no cruelties, nor killed any opponents? Uhh….. yes it has. Scientology is horrific when you catch glimpses of how it works behind the scene. They’re famous for endless harassment and legal pressue for anyone who attacks them publicly, and for some truly nasty shit against the people who leave.

But that’s not quite the point. The point is not “Feminism doesn’t do bad stuff, so you should belive it.” The point is “feminism has such a straightforward premise that everyone should be able to get behind, and there aren’t any big meta-reasons for liking the feminist message but not liking the feminist movement.”

“…for the vote.” No feminist screed will be complete without this claim. It wasn’t feminism that got women the vote but “old white men” (eeeew!)

*sigh* Yes, women had to appeal to “old white men” to change the law to allow women to vote, because those men were the ones who could actually write the law. But feminist campaigns were the root cause. Erasing their work erases the work of countless advocacy groups aren’t lawmakers themselves but convince other lawmakers to make changes.

MRAs would be well and truly worthless according to this logic; even if they ever were behind an actual law, it wouldn’t be them that caused it, but the person actually writing the thing down and the people voting for it.

When we examine this issue, we see that when most women favored the vote, within months, they had the vote.

This guy needs to be whisked away to a history class for this comment, or at the very least do some wikipedia research. “The demand for women’s suffrage began to gather strength in the 1840s,” but only became national law in 1920. (source) 1910 was when the first states started giving women the right to vote, and therefore congressmen started getting elected that supported national suffrage. By 1916 it was a major national issue

Even if you want to ignore these decades of work, President Woodrow Wilson made an appeal in January of 1918 to support the latest suffrage bill, saying that the National American Woman Suffrage Association had won a broad consensus. This is a bit more than “within months.” The ratification process alone took from May, 1919, to August, 1920.

And just for good measure, a quote description of the movement at the time.

“[The suffrage movement] was a continuous, seemingly endless, chain of activity. Young suffragists who helped forge the last links of that chain were not born when it began. Old suffragists who forged the first links were dead when it ended.”

– Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the NAWSA, and Nettie Rogers Shuler

This was not an instant thing that happened when the whims of women happened to align.

Though they have supported the male-only draft that forced millions of mens into being slaves of war and die torturous deaths. … I can just imagine the feminists reading this, the same ones that post their fantasies of genitally mutilating, castrating, murdering and sexually torturing men just reassuring themselves over the fact that they don’t have concentration camps, so they must be good. … With their zero sum philosophy, a decline in education for boys means a win for girls.

Christ, these assertions are driving me bonkers. How many times does a feminist have to deny these claims before they go away? No, education is not zero-sum, both boys and girls can be educated. No, feminists don’t like the widespread practice of circumcision, mainly because of consent issues (because the thing itself is demonstrably harmless). No, feminists don’t like the draft, but if the selective service sign up won’t go away then they will never stop campaigning to get women to be incuded in having to sign up.

So they maybe know of one woman who deliberately aborted her fetus because it was male, and — while I don’t think that’s a good thing, if true — that hardly makes up for the history of female infanticide and abortions of fetuses for being female that are common in some parts of the world. I’ll bet there are plenty of US women who have aborted a female fetus because their husband will leave them if they don’t “give him a son”.

As to the draft: I know damn well who started the Vietnam War, drafted me, and locked me up in prison when I refused to go. Let me give you a hint — it wasn’t women.

Let’s examine it. “Feminism has fought no wars. It has set up no concentration camps, starved no enemies, practiced no cruelties.” This is just plain wrong and a bit absurd, but let’s take this at face value. Neither has Buddhism, or scientology …

So specific, and yet, so wrong (TW: Wiki page about Scientology cruelly starving a woman to death). That guy was either making some weird sort of joke or his metaphor abilities rolled a natural one.

M.: I did put in a “maybe” — I definitely don’t trust any of their anecdotes.

But what I find interesting is this.
We all suffer to some extent from confirmation bias We don’t have a choice — you can’t rethink all your basic beliefs every day. The trick is to hold on to strong beliefs without being impervious to contrary evidence.
One of the identifying features of many people on the “right wing” (and also some doctrinaire leftists, I think, but they are less prominent these days) is the STRENGTH of their conformation bias. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that the story aborting the male fetus is true. (Considering the millions of abortions that have been performed just in the US in the last 50 years, it seems highly likely that at least one has been performed because the woman didn’t want a son.) The interesting this is that to the manospherians the existence of ONE example of discrimination against a male presumably for being male (which might just be anecdotal or speculative) asbolutely PROVES the existence of a STRUCTURAL bias against all males, which some will argue proves anti-male bias in EVERY aspect of life.
Valerie Solanas PROVES that ALL feminists want to eliminate men. (While, of course, Eliott Rodger, who wanted to herd all women into concentration camps and watch them starve to death, is obviously just one deranged person.) One woman who killed her son — no matter how many men have killed their daughters — proves that feminists hate men. Feminists who angrily talk about castrating a particularly vicious rapist want to castrate all men.
I think we would all agree that there are feminists who are female supremacists. As a man I need to step a bit lightly where feminism is concerned, but I think everyone here would agree that female supremacists are rare and out of the feminist mainstream.
And I don’t think that if some man spoke out in favor of giving family courts more resources in order to improve the quality of custody decisions, most feminists would automatically consider him a manospherian and an enemy. But that’s what the manospherians do, every day.

Regarding abortion of fetuses because they’re male… I remember a colleague, who’s an expert on medical ethics, mentioning that once. In Sweden, it’s quite rare to decide that you definitely want a child of a specific sex and abort based on that reason, but when people do, it’s usually male fetuses. It’s families who already have a bunch of sons and are determined that their next child is gonna be a daughter. So, well, it does happen. But it’s hardly because feminism have gone too far or anything like that. Rather, in a more feminist society, people would be likely to care less about a child’s gender.

I would say that Scientology had practiced some very heinous cruelties to people like Paulette Cooper. Google “Operation PC Freakout” if you want to know more. And Supply Side Economics was the prevailing paradigm in the early Industrial Age, and managed to kill hundreds of thousands of people with unsafe working conditions and starvation. And Buddhism is the worst, because I only like mustard on my hot dogs, and Buddhism threatens to make me one with everything!

We want any use of violence or abuse on women to be inexcusable, but be perfectly justified when it happens to men, regardless of it’s consensual.</blockquote.

Violence toward women is inexcusable.
If violence is consensual, why should you have to justify it? Go get spanked until you're happy. Who cares?
What unjustifiable non-consensual violence toward men are feminists trying to justify? Does he know that most of the violence done to men is done by other men?

This is gibberish.

All it shows us is that misoginists associate the equality of women with the oppression of men. He does not understand that the opposite of men hitting women is not women hitting men. It's men not hitting women. Either that or they know that's bullshit but feel that they should have the right to hit women and for women to have no recourse for escape.

When we examine this issue, we see that when most women favored the vote, within months, they had the vote.

So he thinks women didn’t even want to vote and when they did they forced men to allow them to vote with a snap of their dainty fingers. I love this. Misoginists are fond of claiming that women didn’t even want to get paid for their labor or have any other basic rights until the evil feminists were suddenly spawned from forth from hell to ruin everything. They’re as ignorant and ugly as Holocaust deniers.

No one truly understands feminism, because feminism is a word hidden behind by lots of people with lots of different agendas.

Okay, gonna address this in short form. There’s two beliefs of feminism-writ-large; if you agree with both of these, you’re an actual feminist. If you dispute either, you’re not.

1: “Women are people, too.” This means that they are entitled to the same respect, expectations and treatment in all arenas of life–professional, legal, social, domestic, economic, etc.

2: “We ain’t there yet.” There’s a set of long-standing and systemic biases built into modern society that cause women to not receive that equal treatment. Some are formal, but changes in the laws over the last half-century have eliminated most of those in the U.S. and Europe. A great many more, however, are informal–habits and subconscious biases and casual conduct that adds up to a set of obstructions and rejections. These biases, taken as a whole, are commonly referred to in feminist study as “The Patriarchy” because the system was largely created by men, for the benefit of some men.

The second clause there? That’s why individuals such as Christina Hoff-Sommers are not considered real feminists–they argue that either there is no systemic bias against women, or even that the bias is set against men as a class.

It’s also the answer to “Why ‘feminism’; why not ‘egalitarianism’?” Feminism exists, as a specific social justice movement, because of those ongoing biases. If you have an uneven playing field, you won’t achieve a level one by adding an equally thick layer of new dirt across the entire thing, you have to concentrate it on the low points.

Now, disagreements DO exist among feminists–about how best to address issues under point 2, and where our priorities ought to be. That’s just the sign of a healthy and vibrant movement, however.

************

On the graphic itself….

Virtually every one of these shows the conspiracy mindset of the MRM. They conflate feminism with women in general (so if any woman says it, it must be a feminist thing–see “The Rules”); they also assume that the entirety of mass media is a feminist outlet, and thus that anything they see on mainstream television is the result of feminist doctrine. If, OTOH, they were to test most of the ‘objectionable’ second-halves of each of those statements to the 2-point creed above, they’d find, quickly, that places where such views are espoused are not, in fact, feminist in nature, and are in many cases anti-feminist.

We want objectification of women in any way to be seen as oppressive and harmful, regardless of whether it’s respectful, welcome, encouraged, or legal.

Bwhahaha, what a steaming pile of hog-snot. Objectification may be legal (as are many other things of no redeeming value), but it can never be “respectful, welcome, [or] encouraged”, for the simple part that NO ONE RESPECTS OBJECTS, OBJECTS CAN’T WELCOME ANYTHING, AND OBJECTS DON’T ENCOURAGE THEIR OWN DAMN OBJECTIFICATION, YOU SILLY FUCKSOCK.

Donate to the Mammoth!

We Hunted the Mammoth is an ad-free, reader-supported publication written and published by longtime journalist David Futrelle, who has been tracking, dissecting, and mocking the growing misogynistic backlash since 2010, exposing the hateful ideologies of Men’s Rights Activists, incels, alt-rightists and many others.

We depend on support from people like you. Please consider a donation or a monthly pledge by clicking below! there's no need for a PayPal account.

Send comments, questions, and tips for stories to me at dfutrelle@gmail.com, or by clicking here